Opinion: Activists pretending to care should heed the facts

Originally published in The Daily Telegraph, 27 June 2024

Looking after your mates has long been part of Australian culture. Conversely, no one likes someone who pretends to care, but stands with you only when it suits their agenda.

Activist Group ‘Lock the Gate’ once claimed to fight for the rights of farmers and their land. However, in recent years they have abandoned farmers and regional communities.  

Right now, many farmers are up-in-arms about plans to build more high-voltage transmission lines on their properties, along with large scale wind and solar farms. Unfortunately for them, Lock the Gate is missing-in-action.

Farmers have marched on Canberra in protest and lodged thousands of formal objections to proposed wind and solar projects, and transmission lines. Yet Lock the Gate has not lifted a finger to help any farmer concerned about any of these projects.Instead, the group has become fixated on prematurely killing off the jobs of tens of thousands of miners.

Last week, Lock the Gate hosted activists from Sydney on a bus tour of the Hunter Valley so they could ‘peer-and-sneer’ at local mines, and the people who work there.

These Hunter mines provide thousands of jobs for the local community, spend millions of dollars every year with local businesses and deliver millions to the state in royalties that help pay for roads, hospitals, schools and emergency services. Lock the Gate wants them shut.

The tourists did not meet with hard-working local miners, or anyone working in the hundreds of businesses in the region who supply the mines. However they did enjoy a fancy lunch at a local winery so they could sip on Hunter Semillon before heading back to Sydney.

Activist group ‘Blockade Australia’ also wants to stop coal mining in NSW. This week they’ve been putting themselves and others at risk by blocking coal trains on the rail line into Newcastle. Their trespassing and illegal actions have put people in danger, including the emergency services personnel dragged away from more important duties.

Their actions also ignore facts. Coal mining contributes around 30 percent of economic activity in the Hunter and 14,000 jobs in the region. However, while Newcastle may be the world’s largest coal port, last year NSW contributed less than two percent of total global coal production.

This means ending coal mining here would sabotage our own economy and cost thousands of jobs, but barely register in terms of global coal output. Other coal producers would quickly fill the shortfall with poorer quality coal generating higher emissions. Is this what these activists want?

As energy systems change around the world there will be impacts on global coal markets over time. However, export demand for our high quality coal will continue for many years to come.

Our NSW coal miners can meet this demand well into the future – unless the radical activists get their way.

Stephen Galilee
CEO NSW Minerals Council